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"This is not to say Agile itself is bad" But it is bad, no-good, horrible and sucky. If you do have the skill and diligence which are necessary to implement it
by praptak 5y ago
"This is not to say Agile itself is bad"
But it is bad, no-good, horrible and sucky. If you do have the skill and diligence which are necessary to implement it (in a way that doesn't horribly suck), then you don't need to formally implement Agile.
The most productive teams I worked in invariably converged on something like this:
some kind of a backlog
+ a way to know who is working on what
+ informal but frequent and active communication
I think that if you look at the formal and semi-formal methods it's Kanban that is the closest to this model. If you need to placate people who insist on using "A Method", then at least try to convince them to use Kanban.
- blinkingled 5y agoI completely agree - that's really what I meant by Agile as a philosophy isn't bad - its implementations? Sure. You hire competent developers that want to do cool things and you give them the basic necessary tools to self organize. You give them sound direction and a reasonable timeframe and they will self organize - maybe have infrequent checkups to ensure nothing is derailing or needs escalation and most projects can be successful with minimum overheads.
- lostcolony 5y agoI describe this as "agile manifesto" vs "agile methodology". The agile manifesto attempted to describe a culture where devs could get things done. All the methodologies are a bundle of useful ideas that came out of people attempting to find a process that fit the agile manifesto (and still delivered what the business cared about), but have been taken by consultancies, stripped of context, and sold as a panacea for what ails a company. It's attempting to treat the symptoms, not the cause; the cause of what ails a company is bad culture, not bad process.
- dennis_jeeves 5y agoThanks for using the terms 'formal' and 'informal'. Smart people/groups always refine their process so that it works optimally. I'm sure that long before this Agile nonsense there were team that implemented aspects of it informally. Something similar goes for what is considered the 'scientific' method. It probably existed in various forms before the term was coined. Notice how the word 'science' is used ( or misused if you will) and the 'scientific' method used to justify a claim. Teaching low IQ people a 'process' that involves refining it later, never really works.